I have been reading it and I don’t think it’s impossible to convert to XM.
However, there have been several extensions to XM (some players support OGG samples in their XM?!) so that’s the point that’s up for discussion. For example, my memory says that Fast Tracker II didn’t have Stereo samples. XRNS to XM conversion would have to mono the samples first if we are aiming for FT2 playable modules.
I’d like to know from the users who actually want this feature… Why? To me, it’s kind of a stupid request but as a coding project it could be fun. What player do you want to be able to play these modules in? What are the expectations?
I’d personally like it so I could participate in OHC one hour compos on espernet using Renoise… I prefer using it over any other tracker out there… so it would be nice to be able to use it for such events. That being the case, it would have to be able to play in FT2 … and hopefully sound somewhat close to what I’ve created in Renoise. I’d imagine getting the effects to work the same is quite probably hopeless, but as long as a non-heavy-on-the-effects song loads and plays in ft2, I’d be happy. I can’t speak for everyone though
… but yah… I guarantee the #1 reason for this request is for use in compos… That’s about all I can see it being useful for at least… perhaps also for making music for video games easier? Bass.dll and fmod.dll play xm files, so lots of game developers use them with oldschool modular formats.
VST/VSTi are out the window. Send channels are out the window. A lot of the XRNI properties go out the window. Internal DSP style effects are out the window. Pre/Post mixing goes out the window.
The whole thing is a pointless endevour, really. My only interest in this is “why not? seems like fun” but to expect any awesomeness in the final results is pretty pointless.
I don’t see this moving beyond the proof of concept stage from me (if I even bother to try?) but maybe someone else will pick up the torch if something gets going.
I am not a pro of trackers. I am just interested in music software and I followed FT2 page on wikipedia, found out Renoise to be the most active developed “contemporary digital audio workstation”, but it’s suprised to see Renoinse does not support .XM, the more “traditional” and popular format export.
Adding .xm export must make renoinse more popular~~~
I doubt it… it is useful on various areas even for some gaming platforms but a dying format as well. It is only being kept alive because a few other trackers support the exportation of this format and some demo groups still use this format in their work, but frankly in the serious music world, XM is pretty dead.
The renoise format is an open standard as well and facilitates a lot more than XM, the only requirement needed is an archive application like Rar or Winzip (or just rename it to .zip and open it in the Windows native archive viewer), unzip the contents and inspect the .XML contents of the inside package.
For as far as ready of use for demo’s, Renoise is pretty much finished.
Being able to export as XM in Renoise would help me too.
I like to do my tracks in multiple formats, to offer them to game-developers on multiple platforms. Standard General MIDI for e.g. Java ME games, XM for smartphone games, PC games and others, and mp3 for Flash - just to name a few.
To do this I currently start my work in Milkytracker, by loading stereosamples as mono. When the XM is done, I convert it to MIDI with Timidity, and import the XM in Renoise. Here I reload all samples again keeping the stereo, and add / replace some effects.
Renoise doesn’t import the XM quite well though, so some tweaking has to be done.
Being able to export XM from Renoise would save me the sample-reloads, which also require me to remap and finetune the instruments for some reason. But this XM export would have to be done perfectly, meaning 100% FT2 compatible. Otherwise various player-libraries used by game-developers will have problems.
As a side bonus it would also make Renoise a nice MIDI -> XM converter, since it loads SMF1 fine.
Fasttracker did take stereo samples after (at) 2.9. my memory could serve me wrong but it was just 2.9> that was mono only.
of course the work around (preferred method) then was to clone your tracks and bring in the left/right channels independently as completely different instruments and hard-pan them. this actually lead to some interesting forced experimentation as you could very easily manipulate the individual channels of a given sample.
but… beyond that… you’ve completely got me stumped as to why i would want to convert an xrns file to xm. uhm. portability if my only laptop ran DOS? i don’t own a laptop so this is purely hypothetical.
seriously?
if you’re bored - you want to try to maybe try and make renoise even more popular by getting more files IN, rather than out? IT (impulse tracker) files, MT (mad tracker) SKM (skale tracker) to name a few… some of these seem dependent upon the original developers willing the source code away but as far as i know at least 3 of those four have made their source public. OMF-XRNS-OMF. seriously. nobody in the normal world would use it, of course. but to the rest of us… ohmygod.
One of the main questions we hear in #renoise about Renoise is “Can it export to .XM?” … mainly because for some odd reason, ft2 users feel the need to stick close to their beloved file format. Sure, this is downright silly, and sure, it seems useless, but in the case of the One Hour Compos that happen on our network, it makes sense. When writing music for a quick competition, the resulting file needs to be small, it needs to be playable by all, and it needs to be easily verifiable that you used only the samples provided. Sure they could play Renoise files in Renoise, but not everyone has Renoise, and XMPlay doesn’t support XRNS. (yet) … so until the compo issue is cleared up somehow, we will forever be recieving such questions from oldschool scene-types who still use trackers mostly for compoing. Perhaps some day the scene will progress, but in the meantime, such a conversion tool would be useful.
(With some wonderful help of the above, BYTE-smasher) I’m working on a conversion tool that supports Madtracker and Renoise. At the moment the focus is converting MT2 -> Renose (which is the only function I myself really care about), but I’ve already had the request to add a Renoise -> XM converter. As this is basically turning the code upside-down, and shouldn’t be too much of a hell, I’ll get to work on it as soon I’ve finished the first part.
I’ve noticed that too. Seems like the good old “I can’t see past my own world” problem.
Yes, Timidity does a surprisingly excellent job at converting XM’s to MIDI actually. Check this example. I was quite amazed when I found out, because I’ve seen lots of people searching for a XM2MIDI converter without luck. Timidity is the tool to use.
